Monday, May 22, 2006

In praise of books in films

Remember that rush for copies of The Third Policeman after it featured in Lost? It might have been better for the book industry had Jean-Luc Godard's plangent masterpiece Eloge de l'Amour captured the public imagination instead. Books feature throughout. Above is a screengrab of the lead actor reading one, although it happens to be blank. Tonight, in yet another viewing, I happened to note down the books as they appeared because the first two caught my attention.

5 comments:

I've always loved Godard's use of books in his films - not as mere reference points, or in-jokes (Woody Allen's use of Crime and Punishment in Match Point, for example) but as the furniture of everyday life. They are on coffee tables, bedstands, carrybags. They are taken out, picked up, quoted from, dropped, returned, exchanged - but always constantly in circulation, always treated by characters as regular currency, rather than the "special" or "fancy" things that characters in mainstream (a loaded, vague word, I know) cinema seem to consider them.

And it isn't always literature they're quoting in Godard. The partygoers of Peirrot Le Fou exchange advertising taglines, and the young rebels of La Chinoise quote Mao with a poet's zeal.

I did think that Godard's swipes at Spielberg in Eloge de l'amour were a little cheap and easy, however.

Yes, it's never solely about literal quotes (though there are enough of them) but the broad field of literature rolling into cinema as well. Am thinking of the Shakespeare class in Bande à part, the playful booktitle jaunt in Une femme est une femme, as well as the voice-over quotes everywhere else. JLG may well be the only director who views literature as the same creative field as cinema, as all creative art. It's an open-source poetry that takes a peculiar genius to weld together as art...

I was also in mind of the indirect scene-analogies like the one in 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, with the comical Bouvard et Pécuchet-like characters reading indiscriminately, wildly, randomly from a mountain of books. And one of them looking up in the cigarette haze, with the stunned stupor of a saturated mind as the reading continues. It's both comical and commentary.